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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

Computer:  Compaq laptop with 24MB RAM

DOS:  mem shows 24MB RAM
DJGPP takes up about 84MB of hard drive.  Maybe there is an older version 
that is a lot smaller?  My partner said it runs really really slowly on 
this computer because it wants 24MB RAM and if not given that much makes 
some sort of swap space.  Therefore NOT recommended for a 386 with 4MB 
RMA.

Booted BL1.  
Checked memory with 'free' -
14.6K total, 12.3M free memory
Assuming that the kernel etc is taking up about 1.4MB, linux is 
recognizing only 16MB RAM.

I did some reading on linux and memory and learned that you can force 
linux to recognize more RAM by specifying the amount.  Don't specify too 
much or it will crash.  So we added to boot.bat after zimage
mem=24M  (or 24m also works).

'free' - total 22,700 kilobytes, free 20,400 kilobytes (roughly).
Of the 24MB total, the BL1 kernel etc. takes up close to 2MB,
and the four virtual consoles and bash and some other things (run 'top' to 
see what they are).

This is the laptop that was being used to compile in BL1 with '12M RAM'.  
It now has a lot more than that (about 22.3MB).

We tested g++ (linux c++ compiler) on a c++ program consisting of abou 
short lines of code and it compiled in 12 seconds.


Rebooted with mem=4M, total mem 2516, free 250 bytes.
Compiled in over 5 minutes, hard drives clicking furiously.

Edited /etc/inittab by putting a # in front of the lines containing 
respawm, agetty, and tty2 3 and 4, to eliminate tree of the four virtual 
terminals, which take up some RAM.  

Rebooted, now only one init instead of three, and free memory is increased 
from 250 to 496 bytes.

The same program compiled in about 1 minute (1/5 the time, double the free 
RAM).

We did not try adding a swap file, but BL1 with only one virtual terminal 
is usable for compiling short programs even without swap partition.

I then tried BL3 with 4M RAM (mem=4MB).  Total 2728, compared with BL1 
2516 bytes, or about 500 bytes more free RAM due to the special small 
kernel that Steven compiled.

BUT BL3 with 3 ttys has only 240 bytes free.  Why?  I had in rc insmod 
slhc ppp and mdacon.  I removed mdacon and then it had not 240 but 168 
bytes free and the init lines (top) read 124 instead of 64 bytes).  Does 
MDA use less RAM than VGA?   

Anyway, why does BL3 have less free RAM than BL1 (168 bytes free without 
mdacon versus 250 bytes) when it has one less virtual terminal and a 
smaller kernel?  

BL1 is on a laptop 486, BL3 on a desktop 586.  Does BL need more RAM to 
run on a newer computer?


In 4MB RAM I can use BL3 with kermit to telnet, no swap partition, but it 
is rather slow and clicks a lot.  


The summary of this all is that BL1 is not bad for compiling on if you 
eliminate all but one virtual terminal and compile up to 40 lines of 
source code (short lines).  And you don't even need a swap partition.  We 
might try seeing if the swap partition increases compiling speed, but it 
does not crash without one.


Would it be possible to learn to compile with BL1 using not libc5 but 
uClibc and if so would it work better in low RAM?  How much disk space 
does uClibc take up?

Sindi